Privacy Policy
Last updated on August 9, 2020.
Welcome to GovGPT! We invite you to read this privacy policy, which explains our privacy practices and how we treat your personal information when you use our Services. It describes the types of personal information collected and created in connection with your use of GovGPT, how and why we use such information, who we share it with, and your legal rights. Unless otherwise indicated, this privacy policy (“Policy”) applies to all our websites, domains, apps, products, services, and features (the “Services”) in all geographies in which GovGPT offers its Services.
When you use GovGPT, there are expectations for how you must respect and protect the privacy of other members.
- What is GovGPT?
GovGPT is civic engagement platform for local governments and residents.
- Who provides the Services and controls my information?
We use “GovGPT” here to refer to our Services and we also use “GovGPT”, “we”, “us”, and “our” to refer to the relevant GovGPT companies described in this section.
If you live in the United States, the Services are operated and provided to you by Nearcast, Inc
- What information is collected?
When we provide the Services, we collect or receive information in several different ways. In many cases you choose what information to provide. Some information is required in order to use GovGPT and for us to provide the Services. We use this information for the purposes described further below.
Note that not all GovGPT account types and features are available in all locations, so some of the examples below may not apply where you live.
3.1. From you, or with your permission.
We collect a variety of information from you when you provide it to us directly, when we request it from you, or when you give us permission to get it from a third party source. Here are some examples of these instances:
- Contact details.
- When you sign up for GovGPT, you provide your name, address, phone number, profile photo, email address, and similar information.
- If you want to join GovGPT or to use a service on GovGPT that is yet to be introduced to your neighborhood, but we don’t yet have service for your neighborhood, you can choose to give us your contact information and ask us to notify you when we do.
- If you contact support, you are providing us with your contact information and a description of the issue so we can respond.
- Network details. If you decide to invite new members to join GovGPT, you can choose to share their residential or email address with us, or share your contacts with us, so we can send an invitation and follow-up reminders to potential new members on your behalf.
- Social data. If you use Facebook to log in to GovGPT (or later connect your Facebook account to your GovGPT account) you authorize Facebook to share your personal information with us, including your name and email address.
- Posts, interests, and recommendations.
- If you want to support a local business, you can choose to share information about it.
- If you want to help your neighbors and GovGPT get to know you better, you may share information about yourself in your profile, including your interests, skills, or even what you love about your neighborhood.
- If you want to connect and communicate with neighbors about specific interests, you may share information about your interests.
- If you want to communicate with your neighbors and share Content, ou might post something on GovGPT.
- If you want to allow us to show you where you are on your neighborhood map, tag your posts, photos and events by location, or verify your address (where available), you can enable sharing this in your settings.
- Payment information. If you make a payment either to or through GovGPT, you are providing our trusted third party payment processors with certain payment information in order to complete the transaction.
- Survey data. If you take part in surveys or other general research we undertake, you may provide information in response.
3.2. From your browser and device.
Like nearly every other online service, we automatically collect technical information when you visit or use GovGPT or read a message from us. We collect information from your browser, computer, or mobile device. This provides us with technical information when you use GovGPT as a visitor or a member, including:
- Device data, which tells about the device you’re using, such as what type and model it is, its operating system and version, its unique identifier, crash data (if applicable), and what settings you’ve enabled. Your device and software settings affect what information your device makes available to us.
- Log data, which is automatically recorded by our servers based on data sent by your app or browser. This typically includes the date and time you visited, the browser or app version you used (and its settings), the URLs you come from and go to, your IP address and protocol, and how you used GovGPT (for example, which links you clicked on).
- Cookie data, which comes from “cookies” (small data files stored on your computer or mobile device) and similar technologies. Cookie data helps us recognize you, remember your preferences, and personalize your experience. Our third party advertising partners also use cookies and similar technologies to collect information about users for advertising purposes as described below. Some, but not all cookie data is associated with your GovGPT account.
- Pixels, SDKs and other storage technologies, which operate similar to cookies and are used by us, as well as by certain third parties, such as social media networks and advertiser platforms, to collect or receive information from our and other websites and apps to provide measurement services and target ads.
3.3. From third parties and public sources.
We may collect information from third parties, service providers, partners, and publicly-available sources, such as:
- Vendors that provide us with map information in order to create and launch new neighborhoods.
- Vendors that provide information about members and their homes for advertising analytics, personalization, and measurement.
- Advertisers that provide us with information about their users or customers to help us personalize advertising or measure the performance of their advertisements.
- Public sources such as census data, street addresses, property lot maps, and postal address change information, which provide us with information that helps us understand our members and potential areas for expansion.
- How is my information used?
We use the information we have to help us provide, operate, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services. We may also use the information we have for other purposes where permitted by law.
4.1. Establishing and developing neighborhoods.
We use information to identify and invite potential new members to GovGPT, and to set up new GovGPT neighborhoods. For example, we use information to identify new members and, if you ask us to, send invitations and reminders on your behalf, send direct mail invitations, invite your Facebook friends, or notify you when we start offering the Services to your neighborhood.
4.2. Setting you up on GovGPT.
In order to enable us to operate and provide the Services, we use certain information to get you started on GovGPT:
- For residential members, we verify that you live at the address you gave us through a combination of your address and a second factor.
- We may notify users of new members as they join the neighborhood, and, for neighbors whose addresses need to be verified.
- Once you register, your personal information is used to populate your profile.
- We use business information to create Business Pages, which help members learn about the businesses in their communities.
- For business or other special accounts, we may verify your address using third-party or publicly available sources, such as business listings or your website.
- When you sign up for GovGPT, you have the opportunity to ask GovGPT to mail invitations to nearby households that are not on GovGPT. These invitations contain your name and street name and are only addressed to nearby households (and do not generally contain recipient householders’ names).
4.3. Provide and improve the Services.
We use both manual and automated systems to analyze and use your Content and other information:
- To operate GovGPT, create neighborhoods, invite neighbors, and improve our products and features.
- To help you publish Content and view and respond to Content from other members, based on posting selections you make when you create a post.
- To highlight popular neighborhood topics or resources on a neighborhood’s public home page or an organization’s public page.
- To select top posts in an area and to deliver and tailor your newsfeed.
- To highlight businesses you may wish to recommend based on your activity on GovGPT.
- To help support businesses recommended by GovGPT members.
- To personalize your experience.
- To understand the trends, usage statistics, and demographic data of the members and neighborhoods we serve.
- To respond to your support requests and comments.
- To test and evaluate potential new products and features on GovGPT.
- To diagnose and resolve problems, analyze trends, and monitor usage and resource needs.
- To accept payments, through our trusted third party payment processors.
4.4. Advertising.
We use your information to provide and improve advertisements and other commercial offerings both on and off the Services:
- To measure whether an advertisement was interesting to members.
- To measure whether an advertisement was effective for the advertiser.
- To help personalize advertisements based on what we think will be of interest to you.
- To provide and measure the effectiveness of personalized advertising.
- To improve the personalization of advertisements.
- We may customize advertising offers you see on GovGPT based on information from our advertisers or vendors, on the demographics of your neighborhood, or on your actions on GovGPT. For example, a home services company might provide a list of addresses eligible for a special deal that we may offer to GovGPT members who live at those addresses. Or, if you search GovGPT for a particular product, we might show you advertisements for providers of that product or related or similar products.
- Is my information shared with third parties?
We share information with service providers, affiliates, partners, and other third parties where it is necessary to perform the Member Agreement, to provide the Services, or for any other purposes described in this Policy.
- Content shared within the GovGPT community.
GovGPT is a platform for neighbors to share helpful information with each other. To that end, we make the Content you post on GovGPT, such as posts, replies, recommendations, messages, and your profile information, visible to other GovGPT members based on the preferences in your settings, the preferences on the Content you provide, and as described in this Policy.
6.1. Account verification.
We may share your personal information with our verification partners, such as telecommunications providers (if you choose to verify your account by providing your telephone number) and Lexis Nexis Risk Solutions (please contact Lexis at ccpa@lexisnexisrisk.com for questions about how they may use your information), to verify your account.
6.2. Legal and safety reasons.
We may retain, preserve, or share your personal information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to: (a) respond, based on applicable law, to a legal request (e.g. a subpoena, a search warrant, court order, or other request from government or law enforcement); (b) detect, investigate, prevent, and address fraud and other illegal activity, security, or technical issues; (c) protect our or others’ rights, property, or safety; (d) enforce our Member Agreement or any other agreements we have with you; (e) prevent physical injury or other harm to any person or entity, including you and members of the general public. For example, we may share your personal information with disaster relief agencies, first responders, and other individuals to facilitate disaster or emergency response efforts.
6.3. Advertising.
If you click on or reply to an advertisement or other offer, we may share your reply with the advertiser, and we may log your interaction as part of tracking the overall effectiveness of the advertisement. We may also pre-populate replies to ads you click on with your contact details, but those details are not shared with the advertiser without your consent.
The Services are supported by third party advertising networks. Our advertising partners use cookies and similar technologies to collect information about our members and their devices over time across GovGPT and different websites and services. We may also share with our advertising partners advertising identifiers of our members to help them personalize the ads they see. Where permissible according to applicable law, we may share certain limited personal information about you in hashed form, such as a hashed email address, with our advertising partners and other companies that help us serve ads. We do this to tailor or target advertising or to identify similar audiences to advertise to. Our advertising partners may be able to associate this information with you based on your advertising identifiers or other personal information they have about you. Our advertising partners use the information they collect to provide our members with personalized ads on GovGPT and on different websites and services, and to measure the effectiveness of the ads.
Our systems are not currently configured to accept browsers’ “Do Not Track” signals, as no industry-wide standard for handling them has been adopted.
6.4. Third party partners.
GovGPT may partner with third party companies to offer members the ability to book a range of different services, such as home improvement, dog walking, personal training, and tutoring. These offers may be integrated into GovGPT, or GovGPT may contain links to other websites or apps featuring the offers. In order to tailor these offers to you, we may share limited information with such third parties, such as your neighborhood or zip code, the business topic of the content you are viewing, or a business search query (for example, a search for “plumber”). When you engage with one of these offers, you may share additional information directly with the third party partner. If you engage with third party partners through GovGPT, the third parties may share with us certain information about you to allow us to coordinate, assess, and improve the services provided to you. This may include information about a booking you make with the third party, including type of service, name and address of provider, and the time of booking. These third parties have their own privacy policies, which will apply to your activity if you click on or interact with their offers featured on GovGPT or other websites or apps.
6.5. Service providers.
We may also share your personal information with service providers and/or data processors to help us operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services. These service providers are contractually required to use it only to provide their service to us, and are contractually prohibited from using it for their own purposes. For example, we use a company to help test and analyze the performance of our website and mobile applications. We may also use trusted third party payment processors to accept payments for certain services made available on GovGPT.
6.6. Business re-organization.
We may need to share your personal information with the relevant participants in transactions (or potential transactions) involving a corporate divestiture, merger, consolidation, acquisition, restructuring, reorganization, or sale or other disposition of some or all of the assets of, or equity interests in, GovGPT or our affiliates.
6.7. Aggregated information.
We share some aggregated information about our neighborhoods with government agency members and other organizational members, such as statistics about neighborhood activity and size. Because of the special role played by government agency accounts, we may provide agency accounts with limited identifying personal information (first name and last initial) for neighborhood Leads, so that the agency can communicate directly with them.
We may also share aggregated or de-identified information with companies we do business with, including our advertisers and partners as well as government agency members or other organizational members.
- How long is my information kept?
We retain your information in our server logs, our databases, and our records for as long as necessary to provide the Services. We may need to retain some of your information for a longer period, such as in order to comply with our legal or regulatory obligations, to resolve disputes or defend against legal claims, or to enforce our Member Agreement.
- How is my information protected?
8.1. Account security.
GovGPT uses technical and organizational measures intended to keep your data secure, including using https on our web pages to reduce the risk of unauthorized interception of your communications during your visits to the website. However, the internet is not a fully secure environment and we cannot guarantee that your personal information won’t be intercepted or improperly accessed. Please ensure that you keep your password safe and do not share it with anyone.
8.2. Other services and websites.
In using GovGPT, you may come across links to websites and services operated by third parties (for example, if a member shares a link to a video on YouTube, or if an advertiser provides a link to a contest or sweepstakes). These third parties have their own privacy policies, which will apply to any personal information they collect. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for such external sites’ privacy and security practices.
- Amendments to this Policy.
We may make changes to this Policy from time to time, so please review it periodically. If we materially change our Policy, we will take steps to notify you in advance of the change, for example by emailing you or by posting a notice in your neighborhood feed.
- Contact us.
If you live in the United States, contact us at Nearcast, Inc, 1580 West El Camino Real Suite 10 Mountain View, California 94040. Email: privacy@hiago.com.
- Jurisdiction-specific disclosures.
11.1. California.
If you are a California resident, this section applies to you. This section describes how we collect, use, and share your personal information in operating our business, and the rights that you have with respect to your personal information. For purposes of this section, “personal information” has the meaning given in the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA), but does not include certain de-identified or aggregated information, information publicly available in government records, or certain information excluded from the CCPA’s scope.
11.1.1. Personal information we collect, use, and share.
The chart below summarizes, during the 12 months preceding the last update of this Privacy Policy, the categories of personal information we collect, as well as where we collect it from, how we use it, and who we share it with.
11.1.2. What are my rights?
These rights are not absolute, are subject to exceptions, and we may be required or permitted by law to decline your request. Only you, a person that you authorize to act on your behalf, or an entity registered with the California Secretary of State that you authorize to act on your behalf, may make a verifiable request related to accessing or deleting your personal information.
11.1.2.1. Access categories of information.
You can access much of your GovGPT information by logging into your GovGPT account. You may also request a description of the following information collected during the past 12 months: the categories of personal information we have collected about you, categories of sources from which the personal information is collected, the purpose for collecting or selling personal information, and categories of third parties with whom we share personal information.
You may make any of these requests by contacting us.
11.1.2.2. Access specific pieces of information.
You can access much of your GovGPT information by logging into your GovGPT account. You may also request specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you during the past 12 months by contacting us.
11.1.2.3. Delete.
You can delete most content you have posted to GovGPT by logging into GovGPT. You may also request that we delete personal information we have collected from you by contacting us.
11.1.2.4. Opt-out of sales.
We do not sell your name, email address, physical address, or phone number unless you give us specific permission. However, California law broadly defines “sale” in a way that may include using targeted advertising services to deliver targeted advertising on the Services or other sites. Like most online publishers and social networks, we use these services, which enable us to provide the Services and relevant offers to you.
As such, our use of these services may constitute a “sale” (as defined by California law) of the following categories of information to advertising partners for such advertising purposes: identifiers such as Internet Protocol address, device IDs, cookie IDs, and advertising IDs; demographic information such as household income, age bracket, and homeownership; commercial information such as the types of products or services you’re interested in purchasing; lifestyle interests such as whether you’re a car enthusiast and inferences drawn therefrom
11.1.2.5. Nondiscrimination.
You have the right to exercise your rights described above free from discriminatory practices prohibited by California law.
11.1.2.6. List of third party marketers.
You have the right to request and obtain from us once a year and free of charge a list of all third parties, if any, to which GovGPT has disclosed certain personal information (as defined by relevant California law) during the preceding calendar year for the third parties’ direct marketing purposes. If you would like such a list, please contact us.
11.1.2.7. Designating an authorized agent.
You may designate an authorized agent to exercise your rights above. We reserve the right to require verification of your authorized agent’s identity and authority, which may include:
- Verification of your identity as described herein.
- A power of attorney pursuant to California Probate Code sections 4000 – 4465 or otherwise sufficient in our discretion to establish your authorized agent’s authority; and/or
- Your authorized agent’s valid government-issued identification or other proof of identity acceptable to us in our sole discretion.
11.1.3. Verifying requests for access to categories of information, access to specific pieces of information, and deletion.
To protect the privacy of your information and account, we are required to verify your request. The verifiable request must describe your request with sufficient detail that allows us to properly understand, evaluate, and respond to the request.
11.1.3.1. Members.
Members can submit a verifiable request by contacting us. If you submit your request by contacting us, we will ask you to re-authenticate your identity, which may include re-entering your password or sending an email from the email address associated with your account.
We reserve the right to require additional proof of your identity and California residency, including government identification.
11.1.3.2. Non-members.
If you are not a member, you can submit a verifiable request by contacting us or emailing us.
In addition, to make an access or deletion request, you will be required to provide additional verification of your identity and California residency, which may include a signed declaration under penalty of perjury that you are the individual whose personal information is the subject of the request, government-issued identification, a reply to a text message sent to the phone number we have in our records, and/or other documentation associating your name with the address we have in our records.
11.2.1. On what legal basis do you collect my information?
To the extent required by applicable law, we will collect your personal information with your consent where required and in accordance with our legitimate need to provide you our Services. Learn more about our legal bases here.
11.2.2. What are my rights?
You benefit from a number of rights in relation to your information that we process. While some of these rights apply generally, certain rights apply only in certain limited cases. We describe these rights below.
11.2.2.1. Access.
If you are unable to obtain the desired information by logging into your GovGPT account, or if you are not currently a GovGPT member, email us at personal-info@GovGPT.com to request a copy of your GovGPT information. If requested and required to do so by applicable law, we will provide your information in an easily accessible format and assist in transferring some of this information to third parties as you request.
11.2.2.2. Rectify, restrict, delete.
You can access, rectify, and delete your GovGPT information by logging into your GovGPT account. If you cannot do this or you do not have a GovGPT account, please contact us and we will rectify, restrict, or delete your information if requested and if required to do so by applicable law.
11.2.2.3. Object.
If we process your information based on our legitimate interests explained above, or in the public interest, you can object to this processing in certain circumstances. In such cases, we will cease processing your information unless we have compelling legitimate grounds to continue processing (including if we are permitted to continue processing under applicable law) or where it is needed for legal reasons.
11.2.2.4. Revoke consent.
Where consent is required for processing under applicable law, you may have the right to withdraw your consent to the processing of your information at any time. If you withdraw your consent to the use of your information for the purposes set out in this Policy, you may not have access to all (or any) of our Services and we might not be able to provide you all (or any) of the Services under this Policy and our Member Agreement. In certain cases, we may continue to process your information after you have withdrawn consent if we have a legal basis to do so, or if your withdrawal of consent was limited to certain processing activities.